This review of Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America by David Horowitz was published yesterday on Amazon. [Added 04/04/2020: Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella addressed some of the issues I raise below.—A.F.]
Across Dark Agenda’s dozen chapters David Horowitz (Radical Son; Mortality and Faith; Black Book of the American Left [in nine volumes]) starkly surveys the outrages that the Left has committed against traditional American sensibilities for more than a hundred years. This short book isn’t a treatise on political philosophy, although evidence of his training in it enriches its pages. It delivers the clean, spare reflections of an American octogenarian who once promoted the leftist worldview he’s been exposing for over thirty years.
According to Horowitz, the Left hates Christianity, Western civilization’s dominant religion, and therefore hates America, arguably that civilization’s finest political creation. These mutually reinforcing hatreds take many forms. Leftist denials of anti-patriotic animus are worthless, for evidence of it abounds and is of long record.
For example, there’s the “discovery” of a mother’s alleged right to procure the death of her unborn child. This offends against the first right named in the Declaration of Independence. Then there’s the ban on public school prayer: Leftists seem only to have heard of the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause, not its free-expression twin.
Democratic-led (i.e., Leftist) state and local governments virtually nullify the right to bear arms articulated in the Second Amendment, a bulwark against a potentially tyrannical government. In a health emergency, for example, the government shutters as “non-essential” gun stores along with theaters and restaurants.
Neither able nor willing to build consensus and win arguments in town halls and voting booths—the American way—Leftists, in addition to their slander, rioting, spying and other crimes, have achieved their aims by seeking and winning diktats from unelected jurists.
A moral theologian once aphorized that social engineering begins with verbal engineering, and Horowitz abundantly illustrates that truth. Americans live under a linguistic tyranny against which no charitable appeal to nuance or good will is a defense. (He notes that “‘people of color’ is a term created by people who are at war with this culture” [167].) Dissenters from the politically correct orthodoxy are diagnosed as suffering from one “phobia” or another.
Racism “explains” nearly everything the anti-Christian elites don’t like about America, past and present. Quack psychiatry replaces arguments. “Democratic” American Leftists are not slow to suggest that their political adversaries—mainly, but not exclusively, conservative Christians, and especially those of European descent—are lunatics for whom an asylum is medically indicated. This was, of course, business-as-usual in the old Soviet Union.
As the subtitle suggests, we’re in a “war” in which one side aims at undermining and ultimately displacing the Western norm of debate and consensus-achievement with judicial diktat. Why? Because Leftists can’t win the debates, popular or academic, that constitute the consensus-seeking process.
“Cultural Marxists have extended class warfare to races, genders, and sexual orientations . . .” That is, this is a religious war, and Cultural Marxism is an “anti-religious” religion, an irony lost on its adherents. Against Christianity, Cultural Marxists have set the revolutionary struggle, the ultimate reference point for their every thought and action.
Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.
In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.
For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes?
Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.
Not all conservatives are Christians or theists of any kind. Some are agnostics, like Horowitz. The reader will have to go other writings, notably the aforementioned Mortality and Faith, to understand why he went away empty-handed after looking for life’s meaning in all the traditional religious places.
Which brings me to my slight disappointment in this book, which I nevertheless urge upon all who give a damn: Horowitz failed to exploit his title’s metaphor. The darkness is spiritual, and it contrasts with the Light of the World (John 8:12; John 1:9) whom Christians worship. The political expressions of the spiritual darkness that Horowitz documents are both anti-Christ and anti-Christian.
Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.
Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?
Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.